Being surrounded by over 1,200 enthusiastic audit leaders is an inspiring place to be.

Seeing how audit profession is striving to grow its influence in their organizations, become agents of change, and make strategic contributions is refreshing to say the least. I attended as many sessions as I could and talked to many attendees to gain insight into the industry trends and how the audit professionals think, plan and do their work.

What I was most impressed with when talking to auditors, and compliance and risk management officers was what motivates them. A nice quote that I heard (paraphrased here) was:

“What motivates me is seeing that my recommendations are benefiting the organization.”

That’s a good reason to go to work every day, to inspire change, and to be to motivated to have those difficult dialogues. It’s certainly a good time to be in this profession—to keep our organizations aligned with strategic objectives and address uncertainty.

If you missed the IIA General Audit Management (GAM) conference, here are some highlights of the presentations and discussions that I’d like to share:

1. There is increasing partnership and alignment between Internal Audit and organization governance.

This is not a new topic to auditors; it has been talked about for years and it was good to see the emphasis on this topic in this conference. The expectation for Internal Audit is to look ahead and help key stakeholders in their organization identify unknown risks and opportunities.

A lot of emphasis was put on both performing audit and risk management tasks based on the organization’s objectives and presenting the reports within that context. The goal is to demonstrate to stakeholders how enterprise level risks relate to organization objectives and be able to drill down and show occurrences and details of issues discovered in each area.

3. Use data analytics to improve the conversation between senior leadership and the audit committee about risk coverage.

An organization’s risk universe sets the context of the data and facts that need to be be investigated, tested, and analyzed. Data analytics is not a new trend for internal audit, but putting analysis into the context of an organization’s risk—and presenting a visual report of the facts, findings, and issues discovered during that analysis—was emphasized over and over during the conference.

In summary, the trend is to for Internal Audit departments and audit professionals to operate in a way that the organization, senior management, control owners, and managers see the value that Internal Audit brings to their day-to-day operations and decision making.